Peeping Toms on History": Barry Hannah's Never Die as Postmodern Western

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/31703

Peeping Toms on History :

Barry Hannah s Never Die

as Postmodern Western

by Mark S. Graybill

In his thoughtful essay “Home by Way of California: TheSoutherner as the Last European,” Lewis P. Simpson explores what seemto him basic differences between the mind of the South and its western“other.” The latter, contends Simpson, has corollaries in the artistic visionof northeasterners—Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper,and the “father” of the popular western, Owen Wister —who createfictions in which a hero transcends history amid the pristine, naturallydemocratic vistas of the American landscape. In contrast, the formerextends a tragic European outlook that sees the individual as a creaturetrapped, the hapless victim of history. Simpson’s paradigm has been veryinfluential in southern studies, and one can indeed see how the tragicethos he identifies informs to grand effect the body of southern writingproduced during the fabled Renascence, a literature acutely concernedwith the past in the present (to paraphrase Allen Tate’s famous formula-tion) and the doomed yet heroic efforts to cope with or survive history,not escape it—reflected in Faulkner’s famous proclamation in the Nobelspeech that humanity will not merely “endure,” but “prevail.”

Yet this South-versus-West theory tells only part of the story, for theWest has, since the early nineteenth century, occupied a special place inthe southern imagination. Historian Richard Slotkin notes in particularhow southerners have “mythologiz[ed] . . . the Frontier . . . as a new Gardenof Eden”; he locates this mythos in a Jeffersonian agrarianism in whichthe “frontier . . . promises complete felicity, the satisfaction of all demandsand the reconciliation of all contradictions” (69–70). No less a canonical

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southern text than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)—identified byboth Tate and Louis D. Rubin as the first modern southern novel—bears out this representation, as Simpson himself tacitly admits. Huck’saccount shows that life is “satisfying” only when marked by a pastoralplenitude beyond the artificial and hypocritical constraints of southern(read eastern) culture, a realization that ultimately impels him to “lightout for the territory” of the western frontier. Twain’s story may lack thegunplay of the novels that were already beginning to gain popularity inthe 1880s, but in its fusion of the southern pastoral and the unadulteratedfrontier, it is in many ways the prototypical “western.” Its influence con-tinues as contemporary southern fictionists, including Charles Portis,Richard Ford, Ishmael Reed, and Cormac McCarthy, stake out territorywest of the Mississippi. The popularity of McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy

confirms most decisively how alluring the West remains for southernwriters and readers alike.

Such recent authors, however, offer a more complicated version ofthe western than does Twain. Whereas the modern (or “proto-modern”)Huckleberry Finn helped establish the cultural authority of a mythologizedWest, its successors have done much to question that authority. In thisrespect, they might be called “postmodern.” The western’s role as a total-izing construction that organizes history into a coherent, “satisfying” setof patterns that essentialize American identity marks it as an example ofwhat Jean-François Lyotard calls “metanarrative.”1 For Lyotard and othernoted theorists, postmodern art exhibits a thoroughgoing “incredulitytoward metanarratives” and usually strives to undermine these over-arching “stories” from within. Linda Hutcheon has shown that post-modern novels about the West, in particular, exhibit a “contradictoryattraction/repulsion to structure and patterns” that uses and abuses thewestern as a genre, ultimately destabilizing the historical, political, andpersonal fantasies it tries to fulfill (133). One of the most well-knownnovels by a southerner to do this is McCarthy’s prelude to The Border

Trilogy, Blood Meridian (1985).This fascinating account of exploitation and violence parodies Huckle-

berry Finn and later westerns. The protagonist, minimalistically named “thekid,” lights out for the territory emptied of Huck’s moral sensibilities,lacking even the modifier that gives western heroes such as Billy the Kid,the Sundance Kid, and the Cisco Kid their uniqueness. If, as John Caweltisays, the western landscape traditionally “suggest[s] the epic courage andregenerative power of the hero” (40), there is no such symbiotic relation-ship between character and earth in Blood Meridian. Absent also are the civ-

Never Die as Postmodern Western 95

ilizing forces typically found in westerns, for example, wife, schoolmarm,reverend, and sheriff. Moreover, Robert Jarrett has shown how the novelturns inside out the tendency of the “Golden Age western . . . to divide ter-ritorial antagonists into allegorical groups of ‘good’ white and ‘bad’ blackhats (or white and red skin)” (70). As the novel unfolds, it alternately cele-brates, condemns, and ignores the violence typical of westerns. The plot“fail[s] to constitute a pattern, to unveil a mystery or to serve any compre-hensible purpose” (Shaviro 147), thus calling into question at every turnthe ability of any paradigm to explain either history or the novel itself.

Representative of the entire book is the brilliant, brutal Judge Holden,a philosopher who holds forth continuously on the idea of order in theWest and in the world at large, who stresses order’s singular sovereignty aswell as its utter provisionality. His presence not only problematizes “theWest” as we have come to know it, but reminds us continually “that thereare all kinds of orders and systems in our world”—Christianity, pas-toralism, capitalism, manifest destiny—“and that we create them all,” arealization that radically “condition[s] their truth value” (Hutcheon 43).Praised by commentators such as John Emil Sepich for its scrupulousattention to historical detail, Blood Meridian nevertheless makes it verydifficult to find meaning in the past, to locate in it the essential authorityof myth. Holden’s sinister dance near the novel’s close, after he has likelymurdered the kid in an outhouse, might be a metaphor for the entirenovel, a performance that sweeps the reader along with a perverse, carni-valistic energy: “He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favor-ite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he willnever die” (335). Is Holden good or evil? Is he, in his ultra-rationalism,a product of the Enlightenment, or does his desire for elemental violencemake him pre-modern, a throwback to the days of ancient ritual andmyth? Was the western frontier fundamentally moral (as countless ver-sions have asked us to believe), immoral, or amoral? Blood Meridian prof-fers the “true” West insofar as it reflects how chaotic a waltz history is,and how limited yet intoxicating human attempts to render it harmo-niously are. In its insistence on the raw, overwhelming power of history,the novel bears out Simpson’s notion of a southern world view; in itsrecognition that the coherent patterns we impose on the past are bothinevitable and illusory, it strikes me as postmodern.

Barry Hannah’s Never Die (1991) has not, unfortunately, enjoyed theattention generated by Blood Meridian, with which it shares some notablefeatures. Hannah has called Blood Meridian his “favorite” McCarthy novel,2and his admiration is evident in several ways in Never Die. The most

96 Southern Literary Journal

obvious sign, of course, is Hannah’s title, almost certainly a direct refer-ence to the repeated phrase in Judge Holden’s concluding performance.Never Die engages in many of the same subversive pleasures as Blood

Meridian and exhibits a similar mixture of violence and humor. Historyand language both take on the quality of a mad dance. As in McCarthy’snovel, an important movement in Never Die’s dance is the subversion ofmetanarratives such as pastoralism, Christianity, industrial capitalism, andthe heroic ethos of the “large-hearted” West. Hannah offers a cast ofexpatriate southerners, each of whom, having gone west to shape a des-tiny in the wake of the Civil War, must watch his or her designs fall apart.Those of us familiar with the popular western also watch our expectationsof the genre disintegrate. As in Blood Meridian, a sense of instability obtainsas the story unfolds, and in the end we are left without most of the com-forts the western typically offers. Hannah denies us even the grandiosityof high tragedy; violence never delivers a catharsis. One of the book’spoints is that the sequence of natural events, in all its otherness, continuesapace, regardless of our attempts to slow it. But if history will “never die,”neither will the human desire to contain it in narrative.

For all it has in common with Blood Meridian, though, Never Die is amuch zanier novel whose parody leads more frequently to peals oflaughter than to uncomfortable smiles or snickers. Whereas McCarthydraws upon certain elements of the conventional western and abandonsothers, Hannah offers up a parodic smorgasbord of characters and sce-narios in order, as Hutcheon might say, “to challenge [them] and yet to usethem, even to milk them for all they are worth” (133). All the recognizableconstituents are there: the small outpost of a town, a place “even the mapseem[s] barely interested in” (92); the sheriff charged to keep order; thelegendary gunfighter; the schoolmarm and the good-hearted saloonwhore; the “civil servants,” including a doctor and judge; the villain andhis entourage; and the requisite show down between “good guy” and“bad guy.” Yet this is all off-center, sometimes radically so. The obligatoryaction usually does not yield the expected results. The characters, who goby names like Fingo, Edwin Smoot, Kyle Nitburg, and Luther Nix, havea cartoonish quality not unlike what one finds in Thomas Pynchon’sfiction. There are no white hats-versus-black hats tableaus; this is anotherlawless country in which everyone is just as much “bad guy” as “goodguy”—including the hero manquè, Fernando—and violent farce, notmorality, reigns. As one reviewer approvingly puts it, with its skewed takeon western conventions of characterization and plot, Never Die reads “likepure burlesque scored for ukulele” (Coates 3).


Not all reviewers agree on the merits of Hannah’s approach. JanetKaye complains that the requisite violence of the western “is unsettling”in this novel “but for all the wrong reasons. The perpetrators are pre-sented as if they were the Marx Brothers doing a combination westernparody and slasher film.” The real problem, as Kaye sees it, is that the“characters in this novel are undeveloped, and Mr. Hannah’s fine, wryinsight is wasted when applied to caricatures.” She concludes by asking,“when, as in Never Die, bad things happen to bad caricatures, who is tocare?” (18). If Hannah’s supporters in academe disagree with such anassessment, none have said so: to my knowledge, a substantial journalarticle or book chapter about the novel has yet to appear at this writing.

There has, however, been at least one thorough and compelling articlepublished on the way western conventions are appropriated by post-modern writers generally. While Theo D’haen’s “Popular Genre Conven-tions in Postmodern Fiction: The Case of the Western” appeared severalyears before Never Die, many of its points prove useful in understandingHannah’s postmodern western and help to correct overly reductive read-ings like Kaye’s.3 D’haen suggests that though popular forms like thewestern are anti-modernist in that they challenge “‘high art’ . . . as the lastmetanarrative, the last bastion of the humanist world view” espoused byNew Critics T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis (163), they nevertheless seek tocreate a kind of literary and moral “consensus” in society (164), a projectthat Lyotard would see as basically modernist. Citing Cawelti, D’haenexplains how “formula stories,” of which the western is a prime example,“serve their audience’s needs of escape and relaxation” by “project[ing ]‘collective fantasies shared by large groups of people.’ ” Hence, they “helpto maintain a culture’s ongoing consensus about the nature of reality andmorality” (Cawelti, qtd in D’haen 164). But one important differencebetween formula stories and “serious” literature, argues D’haen, is that“the formula’s frame of reference . . . is primarily ‘generic’ [rather than]‘mimetic,’ ” a distinction that “tallies rather well with the Postmodernist ideaof the world itself as story,” as a network of fictional codes. Postmodernwriters including E.L. Doctorow, Richard Brautigan, and Louis Ferron(all of whom D’haen discusses in some detail) exploit popular genres by

turn[ing ] the blatant codedness of these formulas upon itself in orderto express their distrust/disbelief in all metanarratives: they play havocwith the formulaic conventions to upset, rather than uphold, the veryidea that there could be such a thing as a tenable metanarrative, andto reveal literature’s complicity in ideology building. (165–166)


While postmodernists employ the various codes upon which the westernrelies—D’haen mentions just a few, including the conflict between heroand villain, which ends with the former reestablishing order through vio-lence over the admonitions of “an eastern schoolmarm or a heart-of-goldsaloon lady or whore madam”—they subvert those codes “to reveal theprojective character of these principles by first invoking them, and thennegating the conventions evoking them” (166). This is very much Hannah’stactic in Never Die.

Consider, for example, the novel’s “hero,” Fernando Muré. At first, heappears to be precisely what his Spanish-sounding name suggests: a kindof caballero who walks the streets in a “fedora [with] his long tan Mexicancigarettes” (5). Fernando is a “mediocre gambler” who nevertheless wins“a fortune” in money and respect when he demonstrates his prowess witha gun after a poker game gone bad. Confronted by “three angry men”with guns,

Fernando sensed what was happening [and] threw over the table,got behind it and received fire. With his left hand around his groinhe ducked his head and fired through the table itself, took out theother pistol and did the same. When the smoke cleared, the tablewas shredded, but he had not suffered a scratch. All three of hisadversaries lay dead. (4)

After this, Fernando’s legend grows. Later we learn that around town, “itwas rumored that [he] could not only see behind his back but around cor-ners” (87). All pretty standard fare for a western. But almost as soon asHannah establishes Fernando as a mythical (and typical) desperado, hebegins to subvert the role. We are told, for example, that the rival gam-blers bore “shotguns loaded for doves,” a small detail that diminishes theirominousness and Fernando’s heroics. The more we learn about this leg-endary gunslinger, the more quirky and less imposing he seems.

For one thing, he is not a Mexican but an idle, terminally bored NewOrleans native with a lisp, a university education, and a severe case ofmelancholia. In talking about Fernando, Hannah admits he had in mindthe stereotypical faded southern aristocrat, a product of a “sad” cultural“incest you see in the delta of Mississippi where big old boys are really justkind of mama’s boys wandering around in the right clothes” with“nothing to assert” (interview). One can see Fernando as a parodic, middle-aged Quentin Compson, brooding and hypersensitive. The narrator assuresus that he was not always so emotional and ineffectual. We are told how asa young man Fernando “could scheme, plunge through, grapple, pitch”


with the best (23). But as Hannah says, Fernando “knows that he is not ahero.” The character himself claims as much, lamenting the way he has beenmythologized: “I didn’t want to be this much Fernando. You know, youstart with little things, they grow, pretty soon there’s something grownbeside you looks like you” (104). Even the recounted escapades during hisearly years, when he was a “bad guy,” evoke laughter, not fear or respect.Out one night on the range, a rattler “just came up and bit him on themouth, and since then, the despised lisp.” On another occasion, he robsa train carrying mail and then sobs “over the letters to loved ones he haddeflected” (23). The town’s women secretly wish for him to “assault themlike a shovel of passion pushed in the grave of their lusts,” but his sadnessis “turning [him] androgynous” (7). Fernando is an alcoholic whose greatesttalent might be his ability to make his testicles—comically named Juanand Manuel—dance.

As in the westerns that D’haen discusses, in Never Die “the reader ismade to reflect on the difference between [this character] and the typicalwestern hero” (D’haen 168). This is especially true when Fernando faces hisprimary nemesis, Edwin Smoot, who himself does not conform to the con-ventional image of a western villain. A dwarf likely imported by Hannahfrom the arguably postmodern TV western The Wild, Wild West, the “lowman” Smoot lays Fernando low early, not through cunning or physicalprowess, but by bashing one of his kneecaps with a baseball bat as a drunkFernando stumbles through town. Later, as Fernando lies passed out in theoffice of Doc Fingo—a homosexual who is in love with his patient andgives him a morphine addiction that will plague him throughout thenovel—Smoot returns with the bat and cracks his other knee.

Fernando is, of course, outraged at being defeated by a “mere nub of avillain” (21), but he is powerless to avenge himself through most of thebook. Instead of finding Smoot, he tries to burn the entire town of Nit-burg. In a more conventional western, this might be an act of heroism, apurification ritual meant to cleanse the corrupt town run by Smoot’s boss,Judge Kyle Nitburg, the man who gives the order to wound Fernando. Inthis novel, however, it is anti-climactic and anti-cathartic, a mere accidentof history. The blaze gets out of hand, and Fernando realizes that he isnot a shaper of history, but a bit player. Commenting on such “climactic”scenes, Hannah wryly points out: “Nothing’s been accomplished. You’veburnt down half of a town. It doesn’t prove anything. . . . Burning up theedifices looks good in the movies, but it doesn’t prove a damn thing, youknow? You’re just knocking down shit, like teenagers” ( interview). WhenFernando and Smoot do eventually have a showdown, it is another parodic


scene both laconic and comic. There is none of the anticipated “gun-play”—which should not be surprising, since the judge warns earlier thatthere never was “much . . . play. People shot each other, from the back atclose range, preferably” (48)—and Smoot actually demands that Fer-nando kill him. When Fernando “raise[s] the gun without much determi-nation,” Smoot says he wants the deed done with a knife, and his adver-sary, who admits “I ain’t never been a knife man . . . and I ain’t got thestrength,” begins to walk away. Then comes one of the funny yet dis-turbing exchanges at which Hannah is so adept:

—I’ll shoot you where you stand, nigger! cried Smoot.Fernando looked around again.—Smoot, I’m not a nigger.—In my world you are! You ain’t never known my world! This ain’tover! I’ll shoot you where you stand! (143)

With that, Fernando grudgingly fires on and kills Smoot, winning the“duel” without a trace of the usual drama.

Hannah’s subversion of the hero and villain figures might be enoughby itself to thwart the reader’s expectations and expose the fissures in themythology westerns rely upon for their cultural authority. But Hannahtakes similar liberties with most of the other character types as well. Thelocal preacher, McCorkindale, is plagued by lust and proliferating bodyhair. The powerful Judge Nitburg, who seems at first a bit like McCarthy’sHolden, turns out to be an ambivalent, lonely soul “so exquisitely friend-less” that “some afternoons . . . he roll[s] over and over in a hot tub ofwater trying to suck himself ” (30). The women characters are even lessconventional. They occupy the traditional positions in this society, but donot behave in the traditional ways. Stella, the tubercular “slut” who servesas Fernando’s love interest (6), is not really convincing as the typicallykind, sexless village whore, though she is passive enough. But with TallJane—a “tall and strong lesbian prostitute” who procures opium forNermer, the town hermit (124)—Hannah truly savages the stereotypicalwestern saloon madam. When Nitburg erupts into flames and gunfire,it is she, not Fernando, who steps out into the street in “her high heels”and performs the role of gunslinger, cutting down two men and thendancing on their lifeless bodies—because “they killed two of [her] dominopartners” (125).

While women traditionally bring a measure of civility, even domes-ticity, to the western, Never Die never offers “a clean, god fearing, gentleand loving Eastern schoolmarm” like Molly Wood of Wister’s 1902 novel,


The Virginian (D’haen 168). Nandina Nitburg is the closest we get. Thougha school teacher who occasionally memorizes a Psalm, Nandina doesnot play the devoted girlfriend to Fernando; she plays the field, flirtingwith and seducing men in Nitburg as she mines for financial prospects.Nandina’s initial appearance in the novel confirms that while she mayshare Molly Wood’s profession, she shares none of her domesticity andmoral rectitude: we see Nandina kissing her own father down to the“teeth,” attracted to him “just an elf ’s step beyond common practice . . .because of the judge’s late rapid wealth” (13). Like Tall Jane, Nandinacan take care of herself, as she demonstrates when the aptly namedRandy Black solicits sexual favors from her in the desert. After Randygets “down on his knees” expecting that Nandina will “commit some-thing with [him],” she spits on him and rides away (77). She does sobecause Randy, of course, cannot offer her what she really wants: toown “an automobile”—that symbol of power and freedom coveted bymany in the book—and ride along with “the wind in [her] hair, the cockof a gun or whatever you call it in [her] hand, the thrashing putrid smokearound [her]” (21). In the popular western, it is very rare, of course, fora woman—particularly a schoolmarm—to dream of being “a memberof some riding gang” so she can “rain unprovoked violence on something,someone!” (20).

Nandina’s fantasy never comes to fruition, nor do the dreams of theother characters in Never Die — and if the members of this motley grouphave one thing in common, it is that they dream. Yet, among their fantasiesthere is, as one character says about Fernando, not “one dream that’d squarewith the earth” (94). This is one of the more serious aspects of a novelfilled with madcap humor: human dreams—whether in the form of agrand “design,” a waking fantasy, a reverie during sleep, a vision induced byalcohol or morphine, or a novel—do not “square with the earth”; that is,with the inscrutable processes of nature, history, the real. If the traditionalwestern novel fulfills our own fantasies about how the region was “won,”Never Die disturbs those fantasies by drawing our attention to their ideolog-ical underpinnings. If the classic western provides us a window on historyas we want to see it, Hannah’s postmodern version makes us aware of ourlooking, our readerly voyeurism, and shifts our focus to the window’s frame.

Nitburg, the town in which the action of the novel occurs, is itself theapparently realized dream of Judge Kyle Nitburg, a southerner and self-made man who, like Huckleberry Finn and Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpenbefore him, lights out for the territory. He seems motivated both by adesire to escape history and a need to take advantage of and shape it. His


journey begins in the wake of the Civil War, which pitted “brother againstbrother,” or, in his case, “child against mother” (89): upon learning as atwelve-year-old in New Orleans that his mother is a spy for the Confed-eracy, Nitburg promptly turns her in to the Union, collects his one-hundred-dollar reward, and watches her “hanged on a railroad bridge”(1). “He was in the main sweep of an awesome history,” the narrator says,“and he could not help it” (89). But Nitburg tries to carve his niche in his-tory by taking the money, heading west, and building his own modestempire. He marries, then sells his wife to a Comanche tribe “for fourthousand dollars in real gold” (2). Soon after, the west Texas hamlet ofDolores Springs becomes Nitburg, a town the judge manages throughviolence and the distribution of drugs.

Kyle Nitburg reminds one of Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, a southerner forwhom the old ways have no value and capitalism seems the only authority.“This is who settled the West,” says Hannah. “It was not done by well-meaning spirits; it was done by rather vicious capitalism” ( interview).Although Hannah betrays a certain sympathy (both in the novel and in hiscomments about it) for the ingenuity and drive of the judge and his kind,he seems most interested in exposing the economic and social ideologythat motivated settlement of the West—an ideology ignored or disguisedin most westerns. Hutcheon observes that postmodernists use the western“not, as some have claimed, [as] a form of ‘Temporal Escape,’“ but as “acoming to terms with the existing traditions of earlier historical and lit-erary articulations of American-ness” (133). The point seems quite appro-priate vis-à-vis Never Die. The novel, in a fashion similar to Doctorow’sWelcome to Hard Times (and one of its intertexts, Stephen Crane’s “TheBlue Hotel” [1899]), “underline[s] . . . the power of money, greed, andforce on the western frontier: through intertextuality, it is suggested thatsome noble myths have capitalistic exploitation at their core” (133–134).As Hannah interrogates narrative constructions of “American-ness,” hesimultaneously questions representations of the old South by giving us aglimpse of “Snopesism” before the letter.

Capitalism, for all the power it affords Kyle Nitburg, does not, ofcourse, secure for him a place above or outside history. As a metanarra-tive, it is just as provisional as those it has supplanted. The judge, grownolder, senses that his town is on the brink of destruction, and tries to con-vince himself of its—and his—sovereignty. Reflecting on the corruptionand violence that have brought him control—and perhaps on the ironythat violence will presently destroy his dream—Nitburg asks Smoot, “YetNitburg is, is it not?” (99). But the West is not a script waiting for him to


write. History rolls on, according to its own unknown script, as Nitburgburns outside the bathroom window where the judge has spent after-noons masturbating. Although the town does recover from the fire, asdoes the judge, the glory, such as it was, dissipates. Though he “still ha[s]a great deal of money” afterward, “he [can] not think of one thing tobuy” (150), sensing that capitalism has failed him.

Part of the irony in Nitburg’s fall is that it is made possible by the tech-nological innovation ushered in by industrial capitalism: a Winton Flyerautomobile, owned by Navy Remington, Nitburg’s foe, and a World War Ibiplane both play roles in the destruction of the town. By introducingthese symptoms of modernization, Hannah again breaks the rules of theclassic western, for, as Jane Tompkins notes, the genre “requires a techno-logically primitive environment” in which characters can prove themselvesman-to-man (34). No one in the novel is comfortable with these newmachines, though some of them recognize the possibilities for freedomand power they offer. Smoot, for instance, fantasizes about stealing theautomobile and kidnapping, along with it, Remington’s pet monkey:

He dreamed of the picture, the things, the revulsion of the town,the rambling buckboard, the smoke of South Texas dust, himselframming through it in the long steely automobile, beyond it all, cir-cling it, the monkey in goggles sitting next to him. He would mounttwo steel barrels of gasoline in the back seat so he would never runout of fuel. He could drive to Brazil and meet that monkey’s rela-tives if he wanted to. (38–39)

Nandina, of course, also dreams of the car. For her it represents wealth,power, freedom, and an erotic pleasure of the kind J. G. Ballard associateswith automobiles in his controversial novel, Crash (1973). The WintonFlyer (already described in decidedly phallic terms in Smoot’s daydream)becomes most blatantly a sex object during Nandina’s surreptitious visitto Remington’s garage, where she samples some of the oil left in the car’sparking place:

She knelt and put her fingers in the oil, right down to the clay. Thenshe put a finger in her mouth. This was a first for her. So this waswhat made the New World run. There was something awfullyfamiliar about the taste, something from way back there in theswamps, the gas, the rotten roots, the scaly alive things heavingmud around. She put her finger in again and sucked the oil off. Actu-ally, she thought, this tastes better than men. (46)


Tellingly, Nandina later dies in the Winton Flyer. Though she envisionsthe automobile as her deliverance into a brave new world, Hannah knowsdifferently. This is nothing new, he seems to say; where there were horsesand guns before, there are now cars and airplanes mounted with guns.The “New World” should not to be exalted any more than the old, the eraof the “damned, woolly west,” as one character calls it (148). ThoughoutNever Die, Hannah deconstructs both the myth of the wild West and theindustrial/technological metanarrative that supposedly succeeds it.

Hannah also targets two older symbolic orders which complementeach other but are equally illusory: Christianity and the pastoral. True tothe form of his other novels, Hannah is particularly hard on Christianity.As in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), the resident schoolmarmin Never Die reads from that most pastoral of Psalms, the twenty-third.But whereas Grey’s Jane Withersteen subscribes to it faithfully, Nandinadismisses it as nothing more than “a tidy dream” (17). In this respect,Hannah’s western does something that Jane Tompkins argues many west-erns do: it “asserts . . . that Jane Withersteen’s goodness and mercy, the23rd Psalm [which she cites], and the whole Judeo-Christian tradition itrepresents won’t work when the chips are down” (34). Yet it does so in away that inverts Grey’s text, because it is the school teacher, the “goodChristian woman,” and not the gunfighter, who demonstrates the unten-ability of Christian pastoralism. Others in the novel mock the idea thatthe West could be a new Eden, a Christian paradise for southerners on therun from the nightmare of history. Ironically, the Reverend McCorkindaleis one of the most vociferous. His warning to his oblivious congregation—“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Rotten Indian-giver, eh?There is no mercy. Things can turn on you like a stomped snake” (57)—echoes, with comic difference, John Wayne’s eulogy over the bodies ofmen he has murdered in Red River (1948). When McCorkindale does try toplay the role of traditional pastor, suggesting that Fernando sing thehymn “I Walk in the Garden Alone,” Fernando quips, “That’s for themthat can walk. I can hardly tumble toward the outhouse” (36).

As unviable as Christianity and the pastoral may be, visions of Edenseem to permeate other characters’ dreams of what the West should be,just as Richard Slotkin suggests it did for many southerners in the nine-teenth century. The hermit, Nermer, continuously reads Psalm 23, con-vinced it is “the only verse a man need[s], really” (28). Sheriff NebLewton has strange dreams in which “he curses God,” but in which“something still calls him from a cool garden in his memory” (5). Andthen there is Navy Remington, the eccentric sea captain and veteran of


the Confederacy, a gentleman who remembers fighting for “the OldCause,” whose “life ha[s] been heavy with honor and duty” (82). Morethan any of his fellow expatriates, he seems to believe he can transplantthe dispossessed garden of the South in the open, virginal spaces of theWest. Though he has purchased a piece of the industrialized world in theWinton Flyer, Remington’s style of life might be best described asagrarian. He has established a little pastoral island, a sheep ranch with agarden forty miles east of Nitburg (3). He has also taken up writing as a gen-tlemanly avocation, evidenced by his manuscript, The History of My Life and

Times by Capt. A. Navy Remington (41). But, unknown to him, his pastoraldesign is being sabotaged by Smoot, who breaks into his house and“poison[s] his garden every solstice.” As Smoot thinks about how he hasduped Remington, an image both humourous and pathetic emerges:“Navy Remington might have been a big man on the sea, but he was afool moving his garden from place to place in a sublime watered meadow.Probably looking up at the sky toward God and asking what the deucewere these last two years, Papa? Smoot smiled, but not very much” (40)The humor and pathos of this scenario spring, oddly enough, from thesame realization. Remington’s predicament parallels that of all the char-acters: he journeys west with a dream, a design, only to see his desiresmysteriously, inexplicably thwarted.

Readers who find special pleasure in classic representations of theWest—that is, representations that emphasize its mythical qualities—likelyhave similarly frustrated expectations as they make their journey throughNever Die. As they see less than heroic fates befall Hannah’s collection ofwierdo outcasts, they sense the dissolution of the West as they have alwaysknown and loved it, perhaps not because they identify with the characters,but, paradoxically, because they do not. The novel has the effect of makingus aware of our own readerly desires, our own need to have the history ofthe West ( intermingled, in various ways, with the history of the South andof all America) assume a particular shape and order. It achieves this effectby manipulating generic conventions, of course, but it also employs otherself-reflexive strategies to focus our attention on the processes by whichmyths and fantasies are made.

Some of those strategies are blatant, some subtle. Fernando talks ratherovertly about how “real” people and events are inevitably subsumed intonarrative: “Comes to a point where you ain’t nothing but a couple of sto-ries blowing around like a weed” (83). The stories get started by assortedchroniclers—poets, photographers, newspaper men—and then becometheir own essence, their own reality. Hannah consistently mocks the human


appetite for myth on which they thrive. He parodies, for instance, theinflated rhetoric of myth with L. P. Sheheen’s account of the final con-frontation between Fernando and Smoot. A man supposedly obsessed with“facts,” Sheheen’s version is rife with clichés characteristic of the dime novel,the cowboy movie, and the television western: “The sun was dark and hot.But their guns were long. . . . How it begun was not wrote out well for Fer-nando. . . . The last to fall was the low man Smoot. . . . We will be here at thesame time tomorrow, my children” (144–147). This parodic scop’s oration isdevastatingly funny largely because the “children” to whom Sheheen speaksare actually hogs. But at times, Hannah abandons knee-slapping humor infavor of evocation. In the novel’s opening, the narrator mentions that KyleNitburg had been photographed next to his mother’s dangling corpse afterbetraying her: “An early cameraman got it perfectly in black and white.He was a student of Matthew Brady, the great Civil War photographer”(2). Though it seems an insignificant detail, it hints at the way history hasbeen “captured” on film, framed for easy viewing. The mention of Brady—a kind of legend in his own right who purportedly “staged” some of his pic-tures to get the best effect—might also remind us to what degree historicalrepresentations are always illusory, inherently fictitious.

As D’haen observes, postmodern novels usually foreground the “pro-jective character” of representations, especially when society has affordedthem, for whatever reason, some special authority. Perhaps Never Die doesthis most effectively by employing a theme beloved by postmodern authorsfrom Nabokov and Pynchon to Julio Cortázar and John Fowles: voyeurism.Of course, the story depicts for the reader sexual scenes usually absent inwesterns—the judge diddling himself, Remington “ravishing” Nandina,Stella watching Fernando’s testicles dance—but Hannah is interested inmore than sexual appetite. He is concerned with the more intense, per-haps connected, desire to see the past made into myth, to see history“screwed” with.

Near the end of Never Die, the eastern newspaper man Philip Hine, intro-duced earlier as a “kindly verisimilitudinist” (128), expresses most clearlyHannah’s conception of reader-as-voyeur and history-as-fantasy. Hine,whose occupation supposedly depends on objectivity, “freely admit[s]” tobeing “a voyeur . . . [a] peeping Tom.” When his listeners puzzle at thisstatement, he tries to illustrate with an example: what if, he proposes, “anaverage sidewalk-walking woman . . . came in here right in your face, tookoff her clothes, I mean jaybird naked and just stood there with her thingshanging out.” His audience members all agree: “Well. Not really so good.”“But see,” says Hine:


a woman at night across the way through gauze curtains, lighted frombehind, doing the same thing with, say, just a little grace, just a little—here we are—slowness. . . . Time and distance. Distance from thewoman. The time it would take to get her. The whole thing becomessomething else entirely. And who is to say not more real. (151)

Though Nermer and McCorkindale do not understand, Hannah undoubt-edly hopes the reader does. We are all somewhat like Hine, Hannah sug-gests; we who read the novels and histories and watch the films and doc-umentaries are all “peeping Toms on history” ( interview).

The western genre has provided a window on the past, replete with thegossamer drapery to give it all the right effect. As the poststructuralistpsychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might say, the western has satisfied itsreaders’ desires to see “the object as absence.” The voyeur relies on timeand distance, and on a mediating structure—which, in the case of thenovel, means language—to place between him and the fantasy object.But Lacan explains that voyeurism is always an act of projection, a passiveexternalization of desire: “What the voyeur is looking for and finds ismerely a shadow, a shadow behind the curtain. There he will phantasizeany magic of presence, the most graceful of girls, for example, even if onthe other side there is only a hairy athlete” (182). Traditional representa-tions of western history, which remarkably have often been taken for“truth,” facilitate this projective process; put simply, they show us what wewant to see. Such will be the goal of Hines and other chroniclers of theWest. He says as much on the last page of the book, speaking of how themythical status of Fernando and the others will continue to grow: “Everyday, more light from behind, more softness, more gauze. It’s time we heldthe dance of history. You’re all heroes, and folks will miss your kind. His-tory won’t let you hate yourselves anymore” (152).

Never Die consistently frustrates its readers’ voyeuristic designs anddesires, presenting the outlines of characters and events we expect to seein a western, only to pull aside the gauze and reveal misfits, caricatures,and parodies. It resists the temptation to reduce in a realistic narrative theirreducible “sweep of an awesome history” (89). It never takes itself tooseriously, never allows readers to think for very long that this might be the“real” West; as the author himself admits, the book is “false history”whose territory is not the actual West, but “Hannah’s West” ( interview).A delightful exercise in postmodern humor, Never Die counters Hine’schoreographed but seemingly fluid dance of history with the banal andridiculous, the dance of Fernando’s testicles.


Hannah’s only published novel of this decade also recognizes thatthe fantasy of the mythical West will go on unabated, even in an era whenbooks and films are contesting in their various ways that myth4. Ironi-cally, the western’s “gleam,” as Hannah has called it, will continue partlybecause works such as Never Die and Blood Meridian perpetuate it. As DavidCowart writes, no matter how derisive parody is, inasmuch as it “imitates”in some measure its target or “host” text, it “revitalizes as it subverts.” Inthis regard, “even as the truth quotient of the host diminishes, even asits pretensions to absolute insight dissipate, the host benefits from theattachment of its postmodern guest” (Cowart 39). This is a phenomenonof which Hannah, who speaks lovingly of westerns as his generation’sopera, seems quite aware—so much so that he concludes his subversivewestern with a moment of pastiche, a sly nod to the pastoral fantasy thatthe West once seemed to offer: as the aging, unheroic Fernando, saddledwith a “paunch” and a “face . . . slack and grotesque,” sits fishing, “theriver lap[s] green and merry in the cove under the willows” (152). Themyth, Hannah seems to acknowledge, will never die. But at least we canlaugh at it.

notes

1. My conflation of myth and metanarrative here might seem counter-intuitive, but, as Lyotard makes clear, they are two sides of the sameepistemological coin: both “legitimate social and political institutions and prac-tices, forms of legislation, ethics, modes of thought, and symbolics.” The onlydifference is that metanarratives “ground this legitimacy not in an original‘founding’ act,” as myths do, “but in a future to be brought about, that is, in anIdea to realize” (50). As I show, Never Die confronts both myth andmetanarrative through its “serious play.”

2. From an interview with Barry Hannah conducted 27 July 1997 in Oxford,Mississippi. Subsequent quotations are noted parenthetically as “interview.”

3. Hannah himself seems ambivalent about being called a postmodern writer( just as he has seemed, at times, to harbor mixed emotions about being called asouthern writer). While he notes that he has never taken “anti-narrative” as atechnique or “the fragmentation of existence . . . as a theme,” he clearly admiresMcCarthy at least partly because “his novels are postmodern” ( interview).Elsewhere, Hannah has expressed admiration for fictionists such as DonaldBarthelme, Samuel Beckett, and Kurt Vonnegut, all of whom critics oftenconsider postmodern.

4. Never Die bespeaks a familiarity with a number of these films, including SamPeckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), which features a gang of aging “heroes” inconfrontation with a world increasingly run by machines, and Robert Altman’sMcCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), which, as Hannah noted during the interview, treats


the often ignored role of drug abuse in the “wild West.” The year following Never

Die’s publication, of course, saw the release of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992),a film that, among other things, reminds us of the role that writers like Hine haveplayed in creating a mythologized but enduring view of the West.

works cited

Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green UPopular P, n.d.

Coates, Joseph. “Barry Hannah’s Wild West Gunman Seeks a Place Where a BoyCan Roam.” Rev. of Never Die. By Barry Hannah. Chicago Tribune 26 May 1991: 3.

Cowart, David. Literary Symbiosis: The Reconfigured Text in Twentieth-Century Writing.Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993.

D’haen, Theo. “Popular Genre Conventions in Postmodern Fiction: The Case ofthe Western.” Exploring Postmodernism. Eds. Matei Calinescu and DouweFokkema. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988. 161–174.

Hannah, Barry. Never Die. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Seymour Lawrence, 1991.____. Personal interview. 27 July 1997.Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1988.Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997.Kaye, Janet. “Is Nitburg Burning?” Rev. of Never Die. By Barry Hannah. The New

York Times Book Review 7 July 1991: 18.Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan

Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1981.Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Explained. Eds. Julian Pefanis and Morgan

Thomas. Trans. Don Barry et al. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1992.McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. New York:

Vintage International, 1985.Shaviro, Steven. “‘The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian.”

Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce.Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 145–156.

Simpson, Lewis P. “Home by Way of California: The Southerner as the LastEuropean.” Southern Literature in Transition. Eds. Philip Castille and WilliamOsborne. Memphis: Memphis State UP, 1983. 55–70.

Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment. N.p.: Harper Perennial, 1985.Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.


Peeping Toms on History": Barry Hannah's Never Die as Postmodern Western

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